The Developer’s Guide to Leveraging DevOps and Cloud Solutions

We’ve found implementing DevOps practices to have been a key aim for our customers so far in 2025. And there’s no better way to implement better DevOps practices than to leverage cloud services. 

In fact, according to Google Cloud’s State of DevOps report, respondents to their survey who used cloud computing, were 14% more likely to hit and exceed their performance goals, showing the symbiotic relationship between DevOps and cloud services. 

So, what are some of the top cloud services that can help you to work more efficiently, and collaboratively? 

Where DevOps and Cloud Services meet 

DevOps is becoming essential for a dev team to keep up with demand. Ensuring you have the right processes in place and functional workflows will keep you at the top of your game. Cloud services take this to the next level, enabling seamless scalability, and automation. 

By leveraging cloud platforms, your team can deploy applications faster, manage resources more efficiently, and ensure high availability and performance. This combination of DevOps and cloud services empowers you to innovate rapidly and respond to changing market needs with greater agility.  

We’ll be attending Agile on the Beach next month from 3-4 July. This event offers networking opportunities, and a host of talks and workshops aimed at helping you to move with agility. If you want to speak to us about how you can adopt an Agile methodology, talk to us there, or send us a message. 

Turn your DevOps into DevSecOps 

As cyber threats continue to build, and development timelines grow even tighter, ensuring all areas of your business; IT, development, security, can communicate and effectively collaborate has never been more important. 

Awareness is one of the best ways you can ensure cyber security is embedded into your development process. KnowBe4 holds the key to unlocking better DevSecOps in your business. The platform includes awareness training, simulated phishing attacks, and over 1,000 modules aimed at reducing human risk and instilling a security culture. With KnowBe4, you can bring development and cyber security closer together. 

Educate your team on how to identify and respond to threats, embed best practices throughout your development cycle, and soon enough, your devs will become an extension of your cyber security team. 

We’ve posted a blog talking at length about the benefits of cyber security training, from reduced risk to cost-savings and customer satisfaction. 

It’s also worth looking at our cyber security solutions page for other security tools integral for compliance and security. Including endpoint protection, firewalls, pen testing, backup and encryption. 

Streamline your development process 

By breaking down the traditional siloed nature of development and operations, DevOps can also help to take your application to market quicker. At the end of the day, if you’re able to communicate more effectively across teams, and share the responsibility of delivering your applications, you’ll get over the line faster. 

Azure DevOps has a range of cloud services which are great for keeping all areas of your business in the loop. Offering a unified platform and comprehensive set of tools and features like comments, mentions and dashboards, your teams can collaborate across departments.  

Whether it’s through tracking projects and progress on Azure Boards. Automating building, testing and deployment in Azure Pipelines. Or hosting and sharing packages with your team and adding artifacts to your CI/CD pipelines in Azure Artifacts, Azure DevOps has the services you need to go to market faster than ever before. 

Scale your development 

Just as you can streamline your development processes with DevOps and cloud services, you can also become more scalable. Pay for what you need, and nothing more, and increase your capacity as you need it. 

One of your options for making your DevOps processes more scalable is billing your GitHub via Azure on your CSP agreement. Through this, you can get usage-based licensing of the whole range of GitHub products, including GitHub Copilot. This can help you to keep costs down, and make sure you aren’t caught out by usage limits. 

As developers, your needs are ever-changing. This is just one of the ways you can make sure your licensing flexes with your demand. And with the increased flexibility of usage-based licensing, you can add or remove users as your project evolves, making for a more collaborative experience. 

Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) 

What better way to collaborate on a project, than with CI/CD? It makes working on the same project more efficient, with real-time code changes, communication and automated testing.  

A tool like JetBrains TeamCity can unleash the full potential of CI/CD for your team. Flexible workflows. Improved collaboration. Development practices baked into your development cycle. TeamCity makes it easy to build your code in the cloud, whether you’re hybrid or fully in the cloud. 

Automate your routine tasks 

Automation is another key factor in achieving more streamlined development and unlocking greater efficiency. Repetitive tasks consume your time, and hold you back from working on more strategic, or creative aspects of your work. 

You can empower yourself and your team to work more efficiently and build higher quality apps with a number of cloud services. 

AWS CodePipeline is one such service, which provides robust CI/CD, automating the build, test, and deployment process, so you can roll out new features and updates more rapidly. Or, there’s Azure Resource Manager, which, through Infrastructure as Code (IaC), automates your infrastructure provisioning and management. Ultimately delivering a more consistent environment across development, testing and production. 

On the security front, a tool like ManageEngine can automate your patch management, and threat detection, to further that DevSecOps connection. 

Gone are the days where you have to split your time between repetitive tasks and the work that makes your application tick. Automating with some of the tools we’ve mentioned gives you the freedom to unleash your creativity. 

Get the cloud services to take your DevOps to the next level 

Cloud services can take your DevOps practices to a whole new level, with cost savings, scalability, streamlined processes and enhanced security. If you need to migrate your business to the cloud, you can watch our Azure 101 series, which takes you through the whole process of migrating or adopting the cloud, with best practice baked in. 

And if you want to discuss how we can support you in streamlining your development process, get in touch with us using the form below. One of our team will be on-hand to answer any questions you may have, and work to find the best fit for your needs.